After watching their franchise dragged through the mud by a coach who sometimes looked about 12 years old, it should come as no surprise that the Broncos chose the oldest and most experienced of the candidates to succeed him.

It may not be quite Mr. Wilson replacing Dennis the Menace, but it's close. After two years of amateur hour, the Broncos brought in a pro to clean up the mess.

At 55, John Fox has been an NFL head coach for nine seasons and a defensive coordinator for seven more. He is old enough to have been humbled by the game, to know he doesn't know everything, which will be a nice change of pace. And frankly, he was the best the Broncos were going to do in their current state.

Of the eight candidates on their initial list, three weren't interested enough to interview. Jim Harbaugh was the year's hot candidate, so that one may be understandable, although two years ago Josh McDaniels was the hot candidate and considered Denver a promising landing spot.

Mike Mularkey and Gregg Williams were another story. These are coordinators with good teams who failed in their first head coaching attempts. A second failure would probably end the dream, so they have to be careful to pick the right opportunity. From their point of view, the Broncos weren't it.

For one thing, there's the roster talent, which isn't rated highly outside the organization. Particularly on the defensive side, the Broncos are starting from square one, rebuilding the worst defense in the NFL last season. A fundamentally sound defensive coach, Fox is the right man to oversee that job.

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But there are other issues too. For all the affection locally for John Elway, he and Brian Xanders are viewed around the league as a remarkably inexperienced team to lead the Broncos out of the wilderness, particularly because progress depends on savvy personnel decisions from Day 1.

Xanders' survival as general manager from the McDaniels regime remains something of a mystery. Having no other explanation, some in the league believe it was mostly about saving money. In any case, the Broncos desperately needed at least one experienced hand, and Fox provides it.

There was also a sense outside the organization that whoever took the job would be at an immediate disadvantage in the blame game, should progress not come as quickly as fans expect. Elway and Tim Tebow constitute a unique NFL tandem — celebrities who are immensely popular but also basically untested in their current jobs.

Normally, great popularity in the NFL comes with success on the job, so this disconnect is rare. But Elway's popularity derives from his days as a player and Tebow's from his college career and personal attributes. Some outsiders look at the Denver landscape and figure if things don't go well out of the gate, somebody other than those two icons will take the blame. That would leave Xanders and the new coach.

Fox strode into all that without hesitation. He had his own issues. Where else would a coach coming off a 2-14 season be the first choice? This was a match made more of expediency on both sides than true love. But, hey, the last one was true love, at least on the Broncos' part, and look where that got them.

Most important, Fox has turned a bad team around quickly once before. Hearing him say he has "a blueprint" was strangely comforting after watching two years of trial and error. His experience with defense and turnarounds may be the obvious selling points, but Fox brings a number of other attributes the Broncos need now, including intangibles like dignity and a cool head.

He'll also be another good "touchstone" for fans, to use the new-age word of a franchise quite suddenly fascinated by transparency and social media. The Broncos' new motto seems to be, "If we can't be good, at least we can be friendly," and it produced the most open coaching search in memory. Fox is affable enough to do his part.

No knock on Rick Dennison or Perry Fewell, Dirk Koetter or Eric Studesville, but the Broncos just tried the on-the-job training thing and it didn't work out that well. With limited options, their standards were appropriately modest. They went out looking for a grownup who knows what he's doing, and they found one.